Eli Wald. “The Role of Lawyers in Mature Democracies When the Rule of Law is Under Attack.” University of Denver Sturm College of Law Legal Research Paper Series, vol. 24, no. 12 (2025): 1-24.
Legal professions play a key role in creating and preserving democratic societies based on the rule of law. In the United States and other countries with mature legal professions, the role of lawyers in preserving the rule of law is mostly indirect. Lawyers primarily represent and serve paying clients: promoting their clients’ interests, lawyers advise clients to conduct themselves within the bounds of the law, upholding the rule of law. Lawyers are also, nominally, officers of the legal system and public citizens with a special responsibility for the quality of justice, but these roles have long been under-developed, in part because the rule of law was thought to be secure and not in need of more direct protection by lawyers. Recent attacks on the rule of law, core democratic principles, and even lawyers themselves in mature democracies such as the United States and Israel, however, make it necessary to revisit how lawyers do, and more importantly, should actively defend the rule of law. This chapter argues that as persistent challenges to the rule of law mount, lawyers practicing law in mature legal professions cannot continue to take for granted that by representing clients pursuant to the law, they sufficiently protect the rule of law. In other words, lawyers cannot continue to defend the rule of law passively and indirectly. Rather, they ought to take their roles as officers of the legal system and as public citizens seriously and defend the rule of law more actively and directly. The chapter develops the counters of such roles, and explores the professional duties embedded in them.